(Français)
Haiti does not need an imposed peace. Haiti needs a lucid, rooted, and inexorable revolution.
Every society is defined by what it allows to be said, and what it forbids to be thought. When speech is confiscated — when individuals or groups are prevented from expressing their version of history — violence becomes inevitable.
As Hannah Arendt reminds us in her 1970 book On Violence: “violence erupts precisely when the space of speech and political action is shut down. To forbid speech is to feed the explosion.”
The history of political thought teaches us that where truth is denied, revolt takes root. But a revolt without truth and without structure never becomes revolution: it degenerates into chaos.
Haiti’s history, since independence, has been marked by a permanent tension between popular revolt and institutional capture. What diplomats and elites often label as “chaos” is not a cultural fatality, but the product of structural strangulation: foreign interventions, comprador elites, and a protected criminal economy.
At the heart of this multidimensional crisis lies a profound confusion: rebellion, insurrection, violence, and revolution are constantly conflated. In Haiti, everything is confused. And this confusion is deliberately maintained: it serves to criminalize dissent and neutralize alternatives.
In other words: this confusion, sustained by powers and elites, prevents us from distinguishing between a raw cry of despair and a genuine project of political transformation.
It all begins with establishing the distinctions between violence, rebellion, insurrection, and revolution.
Violence
Violence is a raw, blind cry — the ultimate language of the humiliated, those robbed of their voice. It is a disordered explosion of rage. Violence is an instrument, never a political end in itself. It reveals the incapacity of a society to provide space for speech and representation (Arendt).
In Haiti, popular neighborhoods resort to violence as their last language against a captured State, selective justice, and foreign diplomacy that denies their humanity.
Frantz Fanon, in his 1961 classic “The Wretched of the Earth,” shows that violence can be liberating when it destroys the colonial structures that cage the dominated man. But violence only becomes fruitful when it is channeled into a collective project. Otherwise, it collapses into the spiral of revenge.
Rebellion
Rebellion is refusal. It says “NO” to humiliation, hunger, and injustice. But it does not yet carry a project. It breaks consent but remains fragmented.
Albert Camus, in his 1951 essay “The Rebel,” distinguishes revolt as the existential affirmation of “no.”
The rebel says: “I can no longer endure this.” He rises not with a political program, but with dignity. Rebellion can liberate or destroy depending on whether or not it is accompanied by vision. Without structured truth, rebellion dissolves into nihilism.
In the Haitian context, rebellion is the expression of the intolerable: hunger, humiliation, marginalization. It is not organized, but it shatters submission. Friedrich Nietzsche illuminates this posture through his critique of slave morality (Genealogy of Morals, 1887).
Haitian rebellion is not necessarily noble: it is first and foremost a cry against crushing oppression. It may remain fragmentary, but it opens a breach in the wall of resignation.
Insurrection
Insurrection goes beyond rebellion. It is collective. It is the people rising. It implies the constitution of a social force that topples the established order — without always possessing a structured vision of what comes after. Without vision, it degenerates into disorganized anarchy and opens the door to opportunists.
Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in his 1960 book “Critique of Dialectical Reason,” shows that insurrection can emerge from the fusion of subjectivities in action. But if this fusion is not linked to a vision of the future, it collapses into chaotic anarchy.
Philosopher Mikhail Bakunin sees insurrection as a necessary moment — the destruction of oppressive structures. But he warns: without popular self-organization, insurrection can be hijacked by new elites. The void never lasts. Where a captured State lets chaos reign, it later reappears as the sole guarantor of order — justifying even greater repression.
This is precisely Haiti’s tragedy: every popular insurrection is confiscated by imposed transitions, producing a continuity of servitude.
Revolution
Revolution is something else entirely. It is a rooted project. It is the art of transforming rage into organization, refusal into future, chaos into refoundation. In other words: Revolution = structured transformation, rooted in shared truth and clear organization.
Revolution radically differs from rebellion, violence, and insurrection. It requires not only refusal, but the construction of a new symbolic, political, and economic order (Fanon, Arendt).
Fanon shows that anti-colonial revolution is not merely a change of elites, but a total refoundation of man and his institutions. The revolution of 1804 was Haiti’s singular moment of this kind: a radical overturning of world order, a universal affirmation of freedom.
Arendt reminds us that true revolution establishes a lasting space of freedom where the people represent themselves. For two centuries, Haiti has lived in caricature: confiscated revolts, hijacked insurrections, violence without project.
Why Truth is Central
Engaging with those the system labels as “enemies” or “bandits” is indispensable. Listening to the excluded — even voices deemed illegitimate — is not surrender. It is opening the space of truth that alone can transform revolt into revolution.
It prevents frustration, rage, and exclusion from mutating into destructive nihilism. Without speech, there are only bullets. Without popular organization, there is only co-optation. Without rooted project, only chaos. And who benefits from chaos? Not the people. But those who control the criminal economy.
Truth, in its brutality, is better than propaganda. Truth is dangerous, yes. But the absence of truth is fatal. Why?
Because speech liberates what silence imprisons: frustration, rage, injustice, exclusion. Speech is more than a right — it is a mechanism of pacification. To deny speech to the excluded is to confiscate the only weapon that channels rage into language.
As Sartre would argue, existentialist politics means assuming that every choice — speaking, listening, ignoring, repressing — creates the world we inhabit. Not listening is to choose violence. Listening is to open the path of lucid revolution.
Power, Silence, and Chaos
Imposed silence leads directly to uncontrollable anarchy that benefits dominant forces, never the people.
Historian Michel Foucault demonstrated it clearly: every system of power produces its own dissidence. Where expression is repressed, resistance shifts underground, then into violence.
Dialogue — even with those labeled “bandits” — is not legitimizing their acts. It is preventing explosion. To deny them the ability to verbalize their world-view is to push the country into an insurrectionary spiral.
If we continue to impose silence, confusing the speech of the excluded with threat, what we will get is not revolution but total anarchy — a disorganized chaos that serves only the masters of the system.
This is precisely why foreign powers, particularly the U.S., deliberately confuse “violence” with “revolution,” to criminalize all dissent. Rebels are branded “terrorists,” insurgents “criminals,” so that no transformative project can emerge.
As Foucault argued in his 1975 book “Discipline and Punish,” power turns contestation into deviance to neutralize it. When a segment of society is denied the right to tell its story, when it is silenced, the only path left is violence. And this is where disorganized insurrection takes over.
The False Narrative
We are told: “The gangs are the problem.”
No. The real problem lies with comprador elites and foreign powers that capture the State, impose transitions, starve the people, and criminalize dissent.
We are told: “Haiti’s security is important for the United States.”
A lie. Their true concern is the continuity of domination.
We are told: “Do not speak with them.”
But refusing dialogue pushes the wretched toward the only path left: violence.
The Tasks Before Us
The key lies in truth. Because unless we expose the mechanisms and codes by which the system’s agents captured the State and turned it into a criminal machine, every revolt will fuel further chaos.
We must ask:
1) In this chaos, who gains?
2) Is it the people? No.
3) Are the people represented? No.
4) Where is the organization that speaks for the real people against the captured State? It remains to be built.
Our tasks are:
1) Speak truth, even when it disturbs.
2) Open space for speech, so rage becomes consciousness.
3) Transform rebellion into revolution.
4) Build the organization that will represent the people against the captured State.
Nietzsche wrote: “Truths that are not dangerous are hardly worthy of the name” (“Beyond Good and Evil,” 1886). Haiti’s problem today is not lack of discourse, but lack of truth.
The truth Haiti needs is not moral, but structural: to unveil the precise mechanisms by which the State was captured.
Unless we reveal the mechanisms and codes by which the system turned the state into a criminal apparatus, revolt will move in fog. And as Sartre warned: to act without lucidity is to prolong one’s servitude.
We must reveal:
- How the economic and political elite turned the state into a rent machine.
- How the “international community” (i.e. the neocolonial powers and their minions) imposed illegitimate transitions.
- How sanctions, NGOs, and “humanitarianism” became instruments of domination.
Without this unveiling, as Foucault explains, we remain prisoners of an imposed “regime of truth,” and all revolt will be blind.
Conclusion
The Haitian revolution can only be reborn by overcoming the confusion between violence, rebellion, insurrection, and revolution. The essential task is not to deny popular rage, but to transform it into a rooted project of refoundation.
The truth must be told: the mechanisms of the system — arbitrary sanctions, imposed transitions, criminalization of the poor — fuel chaos. To deny this is to condemn Haiti to perpetual anarchy.
The duty of intellectuals and lucid citizens is not to judge rebellion, but to clarify it, to give it an horizon. For without popular organization and a rooted project, rebellion will never become revolution.
So the question remains:
Do we want a revolution founded on truth, or a disorganized chaos that will only serve the masters of the system?
